BY: Tamara Wong Azaiez/ Contributing Writeer Beyoncé, a world superstar, has chosen to collaborate with Arab sensation Oum Kalthoum on her “On the Run” tour. In the beginning of her “Naughty Girl” sequence, Beyoncé uses “Enta Omri” (you are my life), one of Kalthoum’s biggest hits and most famous musical pieces of all time in … Continued
Setting fire to social media, Game of Thrones fans from the Arab world have had a lot to talk about this past season. This epic drama has proven just as addictive in the Arab world as it is here at home. For our readers, we’ve compiled this great article showing some of our favorite Game … Continued
By Laila Lalami
The Nation
PHOTO: Festival participants walk through an area of Hebron inhabited by Israeli settlers on May 24, 2016. (Rob Stothard for The Palestine Festival of Literature)
Palestine expecting to see occupation and degradation, but I had not expected to witness my own privilege so starkly.
“What’s the purpose of your visit?” the officer asked. The epaulets on his blue button-down shirt hung over his narrow shoulders. His eyebrows joined above the bridge of his nose.
“I’m here to give a reading.” I had come to Palestine with a group of poets and writers for a literary festival, with scheduled stops in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nablus, and Haifa.
The officer glanced at the line behind me. “How many are in your group?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many US passports?”
“I don’t know.”
He raised a suspicious eyebrow. “Everything is ‘I don’t know’ ?”
But I really didn’t know. I had met the other writers at a hotel in Jordan the night before, and it hadn’t occurred to me to count their number while we were on the bus from Amman to the Allenby border crossing, nor to ask how many were American. He swiped my blue passport in the machine, then looked up at me with surprise. “You were born in Morocco?”
Here we go, I thought. It had taken me 20 hours to travel from California to Palestine. I dreaded being deported by Israeli immigration, as had happened to some of my Arab friends. “Yes, that’s right.”
“My grandparents were born in Morocco.”
“Whereabouts?” I asked, grateful for the diversion.
“Casablanca,” he said. Then he looked at the screen again. “How old were you when you moved to the United States?” he asked. “Did you move with your parents or by yourself?… Is your husband American?… Are your children American?… Do you miss your husband and children?”
Then it occurred to me that I could ask questions of my own. “Your grandparents are from Casablanca, you said. Do they go back to Morocco for Hiloula?”
His face lit up with a smile. “You know Hiloula?”
“Of course.” The veneration of saints is part of Jewish Moroccan culture.
“Do you know this song?” He sang a few words in Hebrew.
I took a wild guess: “‘Sami al-Maghribi’?”
I don’t think I got it right, but he nodded anyway. Then he typed a few words into a smartphone and held it up to the glass window. It was a YouTube video of Moroccan Jews dancing at a party. A minute later, he printed out my visa and handed me my passport.
When he insisted that he was a UK citizen, he was told, “Enta Falesteeni, khabeebi.” You are Palestinian.
Not a dozen steps behind me, another writer from our group stood waiting. His name was Ahmed Masoud, and he was traveling on a UK passport. But because he had been born in Gaza, he was taken to a special room where he was asked for his Palestinian ID and interrogated for several hours. There was no discussion of music for him, no YouTube videos or fond remembrances of distant lands, only more forms and more questions about the purpose of his visit. When he insisted that he was a UK citizen, like several other writers in our group who had been let through, he was told, “Enta Falesteeni, khabeebi.” You are Palestinian.
Ahmed Masoud was deported that afternoon. He was prevented from reading his work to audiences at the cultural center in Ramallah or walking through the Old City of Jerusalem or taking selfies by the beach in Haifa, the way all the British and American writers did that week. Instead, he was sent back to London.
I had gone to Palestine fully expecting to see occupation and degradation, but I had not expected to witness my own privilege so swiftly or so starkly. My birth in Morocco had made the Moroccan-Israeli immigration official see me for who I was, while Ahmed Masoud’s birth in Palestine had been enough to strip him of his individuality, enough to make the immigration official label him a threat.
The next morning, at the Qalandia checkpoint, I was stuck in line while the soldiers argued with another writer ahead of me. There, at eye level on the blue metal railing, I saw white and pink stickers displaying the Ayat al-Kursi, a Quranic verse that Muslims recite in times of extreme fear or distress. Every morning, Palestinian workers line up to go through these metal cages, and there is never any guarantee they will make it through. I thought of the people who had put the stickers on the metal, to give themselves courage or to inspire it in others.
In the Old City of Jerusalem, I was walking down the street with the journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous when policemen stopped us and demanded to see his passport. What was his crime? Nothing. They just didn’t like the look of him.
In Bethlehem, I saw the wall, an abomination that rises 25 feet and is covered with graffiti. One spray-painted message read “Happy Christmas From Bethlehem.” I was so busy looking up at the wall that I tripped on some empty tear-gas canisters.
In Haifa, which is within Israel’s 1948 borders, I saw a beach. I did not see soldiers.
In Hebron, I saw Palestinian shops with gates that had been welded shut by military order, and I strolled down a street where Palestinians are not allowed to walk, even if they live there. The families who still own homes on this street are forced to enter them from the rear, like servants in a segregated city of the American South. There were no signs warning about this rule, however. Signs can be photographed and distributed. Still, even in the absence of signs, the sight of a street in which the only people standing around are soldiers or settlers is indelible in my mind. I listened to a Palestinian activist talk about the extreme economic hardship brought on by store closures, and then I heard him say, “Despair is a luxury.”
Later, I saw the word “Hope” scrawled on a wall that led to yet another checkpoint.
If despair is a luxury, what is hope? Maybe it, too, is a luxury.
Before leaving Hebron, I bought artwork on Shuhada Street, where shopkeepers had to put up netting to protect themselves from the trash thrown at them by settlers living in the apartments above. In some Native American tribes, dream catchers are used to to keep out bad dreams, allowing only the good ones to enter. But the black mesh that the shopkeepers had put up could not keep out the urine, bleach, or wastewater that the settlers sometimes dumped on them. The Palestinians in Hebron are locked in a nightmare. “Now that you have seen this,” a white-haired shopkeeper said to me, “tell the world about us.”
I am trying.
Source: www.thenation.com
Daily Mail Michelle Obama and her daughters indulged in a traditional Moroccan iftar with Princess Lalla Salma, the wife of King Mohammed VI, on Tuesday evening. The Obamas were joined by actress Meryl Streep and other members of the Moroccan Royal family at the sumptuous dinner to break the fast during the holy Muslim month of … Continued
By AMY NILE LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL As the leader of the Arab Music Ensemble, Dr. Bishr Hijazi hopes to reverse misconceptions about Middle Eastern culture and connect people across the world through the group’s alluring, curious and gentle sounds. Hijazi is a prominent Las Vegas hand surgeon, but when he trades his scalpel for a … Continued
By Heba Kanso CBS News It’s mid-afternoon at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Hamed Sinno is running through a final sound check. His eyes closed, he sings a capella, filling the room with his rich voice and dynamic vibrato, displaying a clear sense of confidence he didn’t always have. “When I was growing … Continued
by Anh Nguyen
Temple-News
Al-Bustan and Prometheus reinterpret the famous piece “Spain” by jazz artist Chick Corea. | COURTESY CHIP COLSON
Inside the Church of the Advocate’s sanctuary, Hanna Khoury stood quietly as the musicians rehearsed their pieces one last time. He shook his head gently, his left foot tapping to the rhythm of the drums. On stage, the musicians followed the melody and not in anyone’s direction. When they wanted to stop, they looked at each other and mildly nodded.
“The sound of the music is wonderful,” said Diana Danot, who came from Ocean City, N.J. to attend the event. “I haven’t heard anything like it before.”
“Musical Encounters,” a three-concert event, brought together Al-Bustan Takht, an ensemble made up of world-renowned musicians in classical Arab music and Prometheus Chamber Orchestra, Philadelphia’s self-managed, self-conducted string ensemble. The final concert was held in the Church of the Advocate at 18th and Diamond streets.
“The purpose of the program is presenting one concert in three different neighborhoods and reaching out to the community,” said Hazami Sayed, executive director in the opening remarks. “[It’s] to showcase the combination of Western classical music and music from the East.”
The previous concerts were held at the Unitarian Society of Germantown and Oxford Mills, which is located in Olde Kensington.
The Takht ensemble is a branch of Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, a non-profit organization based in Philadelphia that seeks to promote conversation and understanding of Arab culture. Al-Bustan has an educational approach with K-12 summer camps and after-school programs to “expose and educate youth and adults of Arab and non-Arab heritage,” according to its website.
“Sayed wanted to find a forum to connect with the Arab culture but not religion based, so she sought out different art forms because they exclude any political or religious affiliation,” said Hanna Khoury, The Takht Ensemble’s music director since 2009.
Al-Bustan emphasizes the education of Arab language, history and culture through choir, dance and percussion, Khoury said.
Founded in 2013, Prometheus, which consists of mostly Temple alumni, took residency at the Church of the Advocate because of its proximity to the university. With frequent shows running and a new season about to unveil, Prometheus offers “high quality entertainment” for the underserved community free of charge, Johnson said.
For the last concert to return to Prometheus’s home, the members of the ensemble wanted the music to foster the neighborhood and the people of North Philadelphia who have been supporting and nurturing its existence.
“Prometheus was born out of the crossroads,” said Johnson, who is the co-founder of the self-managed ensemble. “[It is] where we try to change the way we experience music for both the audience and the performers.”
The mix-and-match production from Prometheus and Al-Bustan Takht traces back to Temple’s Boyer School of Music in 2009. Vena Johnson, who graduated in 2010, was a Violin Performance and Music Education major when she first met Hanna Khoury, who was pursuing a Master of Music Performance at the school.
After their path diverted, Khoury became the Music Director for Al-Bustan Music and led Al-Bustan Takht Ensemble to tour and record with prominent orchestras as well as collaborating with musicians like Lebanese singer Fairouz, Sting and Shakira.
When they met again in 2014, Prometheus collaborated with Al-Bustan to present Marcel Khalife, a well-known Lebanese composer, at Haverford College. After the premiere’s success, the idea of an Arab-Western classical concert consummated into Musical Encounters. Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture was then able to secure funding from PNC Arts Alive, a large initiative designed to support the visual and performing arts in the Greater Philadelphia region, Hazami Sayed said.
The concert started with Prometheus playing a piece by Baroque composer, Antonio Vivaldi. The tacit arrangement was communicated through eye contact and nods, without a conductor.
The distinctive sound of “qanun”, a large string instrument popular in the Middle East, along with the playful, lively and fast-paced sound of percussion added an Arab fusion to popular pieces and genres like Spain by Chick Corea and El Cumbanchero by Rafael Hernandez, a famous Puerto Rican composer.
“It was phenomenal,” said Serge El Helou, the composer of “Lebanese Rhapsody” after his piece was played by Prometheus and Al-Bustan Takht. “My music was made alive.”
Source: temple-news.com
By Brian Schaefer
The New Yorker
Two weeks ago, members of the Lebanese indie-pop band Mashrou’ Leila took the stage in front of a packed crowd at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, wearing a flamboyant yet minimal uniform of black sequinned shirts. They were in Brooklyn to kick off a month-long tour of the United States promoting their recently released fourth album, “Ibn El Leil,” Arabic for “Son of the Night,” which explores the escapism of Beirut’s aggressive, all-encompassing night life. The band’s twenty-eight-year-old songwriter and lead singer, Hamed Sinno, who met his fellow-bandmates eight years ago, at the American University of Beirut, is openly gay, and many of the band’s songs confront topics of gender equality and L.G.B.T. rights. In the crowd at the Music Hall, men held hands near women in hijabs.
After the Brooklyn show, Mashrou’ Leila’s U.S. tour moved on to Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and, on June 10th, Silver Spring, Maryland. The following night, Omar Mateen, a twenty-nine-year-old Afghani-American, opened fire at Pulse, a gay night club in Orlando, murdering forty-nine people in the largest shooting in U.S. history. A day and a half later, Mashrou’ Leila was back onstage, this time at the Hamilton, in Washington, D.C., one block from the White House. “It’s a very particular position to be in . . . to be queer and Arab and Muslim and in the U.S. when this happens,” Sinno told me when we spoke several days later.
Mashrou’ Leila’s blend of progressive lyrics, club beats, and indie sensibility has generated excitement across the Middle East for its fresh vision of what Arab pop can be, distinct from the dominant radio hits that are, as Sinno puts it, mostly the same “regurgitated” attempts at “cultural authenticity with an ethnic edge.” With the help of the Internet, Mashrou’ Leila has found a global audience. The new album, which the band débuted at the Barbican, in London, in November, hit No. 1 on the iTunes charts in the Middle East, and reached No. 13 on Billboard worldwide.
Despite this success, though, the group is still considered underground at home, where both its message and its sound are considered subversive. “We’re always played on the radio in Israel. We’re never played on the radio in Lebanon,” Sinno told me. In April, the band was slated to play the famous Roman amphitheatre in Amman, Jordan, where it had performed three times before. Then the Jordanian government cancelled the show and barred the group from performing in the country. Amman’s district governor told the Associated Press that the band’s lyrics “contradict” the religious beliefs of the monotheistic faiths. On Facebook, the band members wrote that they were being censored because of “our political and religious beliefs and endorsement of gender equality and sexual freedom.” The resulting outcry from fans ultimately led to a reversal of Jordan’s decision and a burst of global publicity that the band has continued to enjoy on the current U.S. tour. Before the show in Williamsburg, the line stretched halfway down North Sixth Street.
Sinno told me that he wrote an album about night clubs because, for two years, that is where he mourned his father, who died in 2013. As part of the Brooklyn set, the band played two songs from the album that exemplify its brand of political pop. “Tayf (Ghost),” which has a melancholy disco feel, refers to the name of a popular gay club in Beirut that Sinno used to frequent, until it was raided, and subsequently closed, in 2013, by local authorities. “I poured tears—neon—on swollen pupils,” Sinno sings. And a deceptively danceable tune, “Maghawir,” is about two innocent bystanders who were shot on their birthdays during conflicts at Beirut night clubs: “Number one, happy birthday, beautiful,” the song goes. “Number two, you’re in for a long night; tell your mother to chill: the club’s a bullet’s throw away . . . shoop shoop shot you down.”
When I spoke to Sinno after Orlando, the band had just performed in Los Angeles and was preparing to head to San Diego. He sounded exhausted and wary. “We were sort of afraid before we came here about how the audience would react to the band, given that Trump is a candidate, and then this happened, and then all those questions, they just multiply,” he said. “I don’t know how to talk about it because, quite frankly, I haven’t digested it yet.” As American politicians scrambled to control the attack’s narrative and Trump patted himself on the back for “being right on radical Islamic terrorism,” Sinno had to stand at a mike in his sparkly black shirt in front of hundreds of fans who were feeling shocked, sad, scared, and skeptical—and looking to him to say something. “Obviously, some of that expectation came from a very friendly place, but also some of that expectation came from a very strange place, which is: You are Arab, so what do you think of all this?” he said, noting the peculiarity of lumping together Arabs with those, like Mateen, of Afghan descent.
For many Mashrou’ Leila fans, the concert in D.C. served as an impromptu communal catharsis. “A bunch of people kept calling it a therapy session,” Sinno said, referring to comments he read on social media. Following the Orlando massacre, many members of the L.G.B.T. community paid tribute to gay bars as vital oases of community and acceptance. “Concerts are the same thing, in that sense,” Sinno said. “Sometimes you just need spaces where you can actually address certain questions comfortably.”
Since the shooting, security at Mashrou’ Leila shows has been heightened, including a police presence, metal detectors, and, in one instance, even dogs. The band returns to New York this week, on the eve of gay-pride festivities, for two performances, Friday and Saturday, at Le Poisson Rouge, in Greenwich Village. The playlist will be similar to the earlier New York show, but Sinno says that the meanings of his songs have changed. “Playing the entire album onstage feels totally different, at this point,” Sinno said. “Everything means something else right now. Everything feels like it’s relevant in its own way.” He wrote the new album at a time in his life when “the only thing I could write about was being sad in the club,” he said. Now, unexpectedly, his audience can empathize with his experience in a new way. “It’s one of those very strange instances where you just have to acknowledge that everything you think is personal is actually very shared.”
Source: www.newyorker.com
Rebecca Ford
Hollywood Reporter
Screenwriter Lindsey Beer is working with Zayid to turn her story into an anthology series.
Maysoon Zayid is a Palestinian-American comedienne and actress whose 2014 TED talk about her career and life living with cerebral palsy became the most watched of the year. She uses her wit and humor to tackle issues of discrimination by empowering and entertaining people — and now she’s taking her story to the small screen.
Zayid is teaming with writer Lindsey Beer (Transformers 5, Barbie) to write an anthology series based loosely on her own life. Zayid has previously turned her story into a screenplay called If I Can Can, but is reworking it with Beer to create a series where each episode is themed around certain headlines like “If I Can Can: Dance” and “If I Can Can: Drive.” Zayid also will star in the project (which is in the vein of Master of None), and it is currently being shopped around town.
Zayid, who was born and raised in New Jersey, has been working in entertainment for 16 years, including films like Don’t Mess With the Zohan, comedy festivals and as a correspondent on Countdown With Keith Olbermann. She is repped by WME.
Beer’s most recent studio feature work includes The Transformers and G.I. Joe writers’ rooms, along with a reimagining of the Little Princess spec with Platinum Dunes set up at Paramount. She is currently writing Barbie for Parkes/McDonald and Sony and Kingkiller Chronicles for Lionsgate. Other features that are set up around town include teen comedy Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, being financed by Black Label Media, and R-rated comedy How to Nail an Alien that’s set up with Atlas Entertainment. Beer is repped by WME.
Watch Zayid’s TED talk here.
Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com
Casting director Nadine Foty is in need of an elderly Arab woman (age 70-80) to play the role of Samia in a short film called Il Mahal. The film is being produced for a Master’s thesis program by students. There is no compensation, but the film can help young Arab Americans invoke thought and discussion … Continued
Kevin Richie
Now Toronto
Mashrou’ Leila’s music is suddenly timelier than ever.
The Beirut-based indie rock band’s dancey fourth album, Ibn El Leil (Son Of The Night), explores the ways grief and escapism converge in the nocturnal world of the Lebanese capital’s clubs.
The line between those two states of mind is particularly blurry in Beirut, which is considered the Middle East’s hedonistic party -capital but also has reputation for violence and suicide bombings.
“Beirut’s one of those strange cities where you have two ends of the spectrum,” guitarist Firas Abou Fakher tells NOW over the phone from a tour stop in San Francisco. “On one hand it’s one of the top places to party, and on the other hand is another narrative: dangerous city, always lots of trouble, always lots of -violence. For us, the nighttime brings a very -interesting negotiation of those two things.”
When news broke that a gunman killed 49 people in a gay club in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, the tragedy reverberated eerily in their own music.
The next day, the five-piece performed the song Maghawir (Commandos) on NPR. The lyrics were inspired by a shooting in a club in Lebanon and, more broadly, the masculine urge to assert dominance through violence.
At Mashrou’ Leila’s gig in Washington, DC, later that night, the band’s singer, Hamed -Sinno, who is gay, took aim at the way the massacre became part of the Islamophobic rhetoric that’s marked the GOP presidential primary race.
“Suddenly, just because you’re brown and queer, you can’t mourn, and it’s really not fucking fair,” he told the audience, according to CNN. “There are a bunch of us who are queer who feel assaulted by that attack, who can’t mourn because we’re also from Muslim families and we exist. This is what it looks like to be called both a terrorist and a faggot.”
They then played Tayf (Ghost), a ballad about a police raid on a gay club. It was a powerful moment for a band that has faced down pre-judice on home turf for making music tackling sexual and religious freedom,
Their name, which means “the night project,” is a testament to the very idea that nighttime and nightlife can become places of refuge for people unable to express their identities freely during the day.
“I like the idea that a club can be more meaningful than just music and gathering,” says Fakher. “I felt that very much at a our show at the Hamilton in DC after the shootings. It was a time when people were nervous, anxious and afraid. For those people to still come to our show and support us is an incredible way of resisting.”
More and more fans are heeding the message from the Lebanese underground. Mashrou’ Leila have amassed a large following in the Middle East and are in the midst of their second North American tour. Their headlining gig at Toronto Pride on July 2 will be their third local appearance and first performance at a Pride festival.
The band’s original members met while studying architecture and design at the American University of Beirut eight years ago.
All self-taught musicians, Fakher, Sinno, violinist Haig Papazian, drummer Carl Gerges and bass guitarist Ibrahim Badr are atypical in Lebanon – not only because they write satirical songs about taboo subjects like sex, partying, religion, nationalism and patriarchy, but because their collaborative process runs counter to the apolitical pop-factory model that’s dominated Arab pop for decades.
Ibn El Leil, which came out last November, is their most personal album yet. Sinno deals with his grief over the death of his father in many of the songs.
The album adds heavy synth sounds into the mix and structurally is inspired by classic pop of the 60s, 70s and 80s.
In much the same way as Sinno poses questions around identity in his lyrics, the rest of the group grapples with what it means to make a pop album in the Arab world today.
“How is it accepted that pop music sung by superstars is considered very Arab, but anything that’s influenced by anything else is suddenly non-Arab or very Western? What does it mean to have compositions to reflect that?” says Fakher.
“In the 30s and 40s, there were French and classical influences in music that is now considered very Arabic,” he continues, adding that a lot of Arab music is traditionally based on monophony and melodies repeated simultaneously across instruments and vocals.
“There’s an ambiguity always as to where the listener stands with respect to the music,” he says.
Despite their subversion of pop norms in the Arab world, Mashrou’ Leila have largely -escaped state censure, but that may not continue to be the case as their profile grows.
In the past two years they’ve worked with Nile Rodgers on an Arabic cover of Daft Punk’s Get Lucky and graced the cover of Rolling Stone in the Middle East, and their album release concert for Ibn El Leil at the Barbican in London was simulcast on MTV Lebanon.
By April, they were famous enough that -Jordanian officials banned them from playing a concert in a historic Amman amphitheatre because their songs “contradicted” the beliefs of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Artists and fans were swift to condemn the cancellation as censorship, and the government quickly reversed the ban.
“It was really ridiculous – there’s no other way of putting it,” says Fakher. “It was a smear campaign. It was ill informed. It was badly written. It was everything you expect from somebody who wants to pass a decision off without causing trouble.”
Given that Mashrou’ Leila had performed in Jordan six times before, he considers the latest controversy a mark of success.
“Some people are [now] less willing to let things slide. [Before] we were not worth their trouble,” he says. “Now people are starting to realize [we are worth their] trouble, which is a bad thing for us but also flattering. It’s quite a compliment.”
Source: nowtoronto.com
BY: Sami Asmar/Contributing Writer Talented artists typically prosper in the U.S. and American audiences are fortunate to have access to world-class music of all genres. Most major cities have full-size orchestras, as do large universities. Some communities are so interested in promoting music education that their high schools have successful classical orchestras. Not counting colleges, … Continued
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